On 7/5/07, Ben Barrett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Heh heh, hardware can *always* do more than the software running it will let you... and many "proprietary" disk formats (which used the same common blanks) merely have a modified format, say skip a couple otherwise-crucial sectors, so theoretically you just need device-level access, time, and luck :) Thankfully I don't know brother typewriters, but they'd have been wise to be using COTS junk with custom software... I've never used WordStar, marbux, but grew up with AppleWorks... however I cannot imagine any common processes to be done on openoffice docs, which seem laggy on any modern machine... granted, openoffice likes ghz+, while I imagine wordstar 7 might be totally amped on 100mhz. The biggest doc-process I've done is re-generating an index for a 100-page book, which had ~10 index items per page (big index IMO)... but my word processing is limited otherwise, so I'm curious.
My biggest was cleaning up about 28,000 document summaries using WordPerfect 5.1 running on a 386-DX2-66 (our Netware 3.x server repurposed for the task.). All of the summaries were done as separate WordPerfect files with fields, but a bunch of the paralegals who were writing the summaries had copied the template files from other machines without setting them to read only, then accidentally inserted stuff that wasn't supposed to be there, including both text and markup. The inconsistencies were creating problems with the Isys search engine. As I recall, we identified about 25 changes that had to be cleaned up, with no uniformity in which files had which problems. So I wrote a WordPerfect script (named BigClean as I recall) that stepped through the files, opening them one at a time, searching for the problems and fixing them if found with search and replace routines, then saving to another directory, deleting the old file, and looping to process the next file. As I recall, the biggest problem in writing the script was persuading WordPerfect to read a directory with so many files without choking. I don't remember the work-around I finally came up with. Anyway, I finally got it to work and put it to work one Friday after work. It ran straight through Sunday night before it was done. It was fascinating to watch, something like watching a rainbird sprinkler (better than yoga for relaxation). Hypnotic. For my money, word processors peaked in WordPerfect for DOS v. 6.2. WordPerfect Corp. was rolling in cash when it began the project and IIRC at the peak had something like 6,000 developers working on it. An amazing word processor. The next version was for Win16 and the next for Win32. But a bunch of WordPerfect got scrapped for the Windows versions in favor of things like Windows common dialogs rather than the outstanding file manager in WP 6.x. Plus the Windows platform was (is) so unstable that no later version really had a chance to measure up. That isn't to say that there were no useful features introduced later, but for sheer productivity and versatility, I don't think there's ever been an equal. OOo is a memory hog, so it benefits from lots of RAM and a good sized swap partition. But unless you need features it doesn't have, you'd probably be happier with KOffice, which is much more conservative on memory requirments. And with the port of KDE and Qt4 to Windows due out next year, KOffice will be available on Windows too. But the real comer in terms of client-side office suites may be Evermore's EIOffice. <http://www.evermoresw.com/weben/product/overview.jsp>. It's proprietary ($99). But it's Java-based and you get both the Linux and Windows versions as part of the package. It carries application integration to an extreme. Right now, it's native file formats are the Microsoft Office binary formats, but we're in discussions with them because of their keen interest in adding ODF support. They're also considering going open source. It's a Chinese outfit that discovered it really couldn't compete in Asia with the price of counterfeit Microsoft Office copies. So they're quickly developing more of a western focus. Where things are headed, however, looks to be server-side office productivity software. If you're looking for some leisure time surfing, you might check out this database of Office 2.0 apps. < http://itredux.com/office-20/database/>. There's some amazingly creative Ajax stuff out there. ben
On 7/5/07, bogan smythe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: ... > The interesting part for me is how this software can trick my machine > into reading a single-density Brother-formatted floppy disk in a HD > floppy drive. ... _______________________________________________ EUGLUG mailing list [email protected] http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug
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